The Heart of the Matter: January 2019

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

The Economist: War Is Peace

Two op-eds in this week’s Economist that are doubly interesting side by side. In one, the magazine claims that “America is not at war.” The other castigates Pakistan for impoverishing its people through military spending.

I guess one way of pretending that western military spending doesn’t impoverish westerners is to suggest the phenomenon exists only in exotic, faraway places like Pakistan. And another way is to pretend that America isn’t at war. Not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Yemen, not in Africa or anywhere else.

I don’t think the term “fake news” has a favorable heat-to-light ratio. But if “America is not at war” isn’t fake news, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

If Pravda had written during the Russia’s war in Afghanistan that the country wasn’t at war, it’s a safe bet the Economist would have been quick to denounce the notion as Orwellian propaganda. What should we call it when the claim comes from a western publication?

Tuesday, January 01, 2019

The Killer Collective, Available Today!

A lot of people have been asking, so here's how to get The Killer Collective TODAY!

If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can sign up for free for Amazon First Reads. AFR gives you early access to The Killer Collective (and much more) all during this January, enabling you to download the Kindle version immediately for free and to order the hardback for one-day delivery at $9.99. Otherwise, the regular releasewith regular prices of $4.99 Kindle and $14.95 hardback—is February 1.

If you’re not a Prime member, you can still sign up for free for AFR, in which case you can download the Kindle version immediately for $1.99 and order the hardback for one-day delivery at $9.99. Again, otherwise, the regular release—with regular prices of $4.99 Kindle and $14.95 hardback—is February 1.

If you already preordered the Kindle version and you download it for free or for $1.99 this month, the preorder will be cancelled and you won't be charged. If you preordered the hardback and order the hardback this month at the reduced price, the preorder will be cancelled and you'll be charged only the reduced AFR price of $9.99.

The program is available in the US, the UK, and Australia. It's not yet available in Canada. Apologies for that; I don’t know why the lag for Canada.

If you were wondering... :)

THE LONE WOLVES OF BARRY EISLER’S BESTSELLING NOVELS COME TOGETHER IN A KILLER TEAM

When a joint FBI-Seattle Police investigation of an international child pornography ring gets too close to certain powerful people, sex-crimes detective Livia Lone becomes the target of a hit that barely goes awry—a hit that had been offered to John Rain, a retired specialist in “natural causes.”

Suspecting the FBI itself was behind the attack, Livia reaches out to former Marine sniper Dox. Together, they assemble an ad hoc group to identify and neutralize the threat. There's Rain. Rain’s estranged lover, Mossad agent and honeytrap specialist Delilah. And Black op soldiers Ben Treven and Daniel Larison, along with their former commander, SpecOps legend Colonel Scot “Hort” Horton.

Moving from Japan to Seattle to DC to Paris, the group fights a series of interlocking conspiracies, each edging closer and closer to the highest levels of the US government.

With uncertain loyalties, conflicting agendas, and smoldering romantic entanglements, these operators will have a hard time forming a team. But in a match as uneven as this one, a collective of killers might be even better.

Welcome

There are a lot of terrific blogs out there on the world of writing, but Heart of the Matter isn't one of them. HOTM primarily covers politics, language as it influences politics, and politics as an exercise in branding and marketing, with the occasional post on some miscellaneous subject that catches my attention.

HOTM has a comments section. Sounds simple enough, but as even a cursory glance at the comments of most political blogs will show, many people would benefit from some guidelines. Here are a few I hope will help.

1. The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would you find persuasive and want her to use? Whatever that is, do it yourself. If you find this simple guideline difficult, I'll explain it slightly differently in #2.

2. Argue for persuasion, not masturbation. If you follow the golden rule above, it's because you're trying to persuade someone. If you instead choose sarcasm and other insults, you can't be trying to persuade (have you ever seen someone's opinion changed by an insult?). If you're not trying to persuade, what you're doing instead is stroking yourself. Now, stroking yourself is fine in private, but I think we can all agree it's a pretty pathetic to do so in public. So unless you like to come across as pathetic, argue to persuade.

3. Compared to the two above, this is just commentary, but: no one cares about your opinion (or mine, for that matter). It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument. Think about it: when was the last time someone persuaded you of the rightness of his opinion just by declaring what it was? Probably it was the same time someone changed your mind with an insult, right? And like insults, naked declarations of opinion, because they can't persuade, are fundamentally masturbatory. And masturbation, again, is not a very polite thing to do on a blog.

Argue with others the way you'd like them to argue with you. Argue with intent to persuade. Argue with evidence and logic. That shouldn't be so hard, should it? Let's give it a try.